UPDATE (3/1/13): Botond Kopacz, the developer behind Era's Adventure, has gotten back to Ars Technica, saying that the use of Nintendo's IP was unknowing and inadvertent. "Actually this is an indie game developed by one developer, so due to the limitation of effort, I purchased a cute character from TurboSquid, one of the biggest 3D asset stores, without knowing the background story of the character Yoshi, since I'm not a Super Mario fan," he said in an e-mail.

Indeed, the model from Era's Adventure does seems to show up in a quick search of Turbosquid's database. Turbosquid representatives weren't immediately available for comment on their hosting of this royalty-free 3D model of Nintendo's copyrighted character.

"Once the game was released on the Play Store, after spending hundreds of hours in making the game, I started receiving 'kind' mails from Super Mario fans that I stole Yoshi, etc. So I started Googling and I realized that the character is really from the Super Mario series," Kopacz said.

But even after hearing about the problem, he says he didn't find anything related to the specific 3D model of Yoshi in the US copyright, trademark, and pattern database. "Since no assets are stolen from any Nintendo game or website and the Yoshi's name is not present anywhere, there is no copyright violation. [There would be] at least pattern violation if the 3D model is detailedly registered in the US pattern database."

Still, Kopacz says he's working on modifying the character to be less similar to Nintendo's iconic dinosaur. "I know that, even if I modify the character a little bit, that this will still be a big problem for the Nintendo fans, but I'm making the game alone so I have really limited time to do some changes. And I still hope that many people will find the game great and many people will enjoy it."

As shown in its official YouTube trailer, the game features a 3D Yoshi model practically indistinguishable from the official art used for Nintendo's popular character (save for a permanent, slightly dazed grin on his face). It's unlikely that an official Nintendo game would feature that model walking around semi-realistic wood-and-stone environments, shooting a never-ending stream of fireballs at random piles of barrels and crates, but hey, you never know when Nintendo will decide to mix up the formula, right?

Unlike Apple, Google puts apps through little-to-no approval process before making them available on its online store, relying on post-release complaints from users or copyright holders instead. That might be for the best, since it's unrealistic to expect Google to do a full copyright and IP search for all of the thousands of apps that are submitted to Google Play every day (and even Apple's system lets through scams like last year's best-selling fake Pokemon Yellow app).

Neither Andev nor Nintendo immediately responded to our request for comment. In any case, we'd expect the normal post-release review process will take down Era's Adventure quite quickly, though it should be noted that none of the 12 "five star" user reviews for the game (out of 14 total so far) seem to mind the game's illegal use of a familiar Nintendo character. And the eventual takedown won't stop the 100 to 500 people that Google Play estimates have already downloaded the game from playing around with a virtual Yoshi on their phones and tablets. Maybe if they squint really hard, they can make themselves believe that Nintendo has actually fulfilled their dreams of a real Yoshi game on Android.

Poor guy, sounds like an honest screw up (although who doesn't know Yoshi!!?) and I hope he gets a replacement character switched in ASAP. Turbosquid seems like the main culprit here.

I didn't know what a Yoshi was either until read this story. So I guess that makes two people worldwide who never heard of Yoshi. Not everyone on the planet plays Nintendo games, of for that matter console games.

158 posts | registered Apr 20, 2010

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl